Decision Journal
Let me write this down so future-me can learn from it.
Open a note and write: today's date, the decision, the options you considered, what you chose, why, and what you expect to happen. Set a reminder to review in 30 days. Take 5 minutes every Sunday to re-read recent entries.
You're making any decision significant enough that you'd want to learn from it later.
The decision is trivial or the journaling habit would create more friction than insight.
Why it works
Memory rewrites history to make you look prescient. A journal captures what you actually thought at the time, not what you later wished you'd thought. This is the compound interest of good judgment.
Your memory is not a recording device — it’s a story editor. After a decision plays out, your brain quietly revises the narrative so that what happened feels like what you expected. You ‘always knew’ it would work out that way. This is comfortable but catastrophic for learning, because you never confront the gap between what you predicted and what occurred. A decision journal freezes your thinking in amber. When you re-read an entry 30 days later, you’ll be surprised — sometimes by how wrong you were, sometimes by what you overlooked, sometimes by how much anxiety you spent on something that resolved itself. Each surprise is a calibration point. Over months, patterns emerge that no amount of introspection could reveal.